THE TRANSFORMATION OF BUSINESS
Increasing numbers of business leaders are trying to articulate a new perspective. One Aquarian Conspirator who works with top management people around the country refers to the new "businessmen-philosophers" who talk to each other until three in the morning about their own changing values and their discoveries of human potential. Business executives may be the most open-minded group in the society, far more open than scholars and professionals, because their success depends on their being able to perceive early trends and new perspectives.
Robert Fegley of General Electric described "a new breed of top executives" taking charge of American corporations, broader and deeper than most of their predecessors, more current, literate, articulate, open. Between 1976 and 1978, he said, the amount of time spent on public issues by chief executives of the top thousand corporations doubled — from 20 to 40 percent. "There is a deep interest in public attitudes and a desire to do something — not only to communicate 'our side of the story' but also to re-examine company policy and change it where necessary. ..."
The president of Trans World Airlines, C. E. Meyer, Jr., ex- pressed the sense of transformed values in an editorial in the airline's magazine in July 1978. The most important change of the past decade was not technological advancement, he said, but "the virtual revolution that has occurred in our collective social awareness." After the turbulence, violence, and confrontations of the late sixties came a period of looking inward, "as if our whole people, shocked and deeply sobered by those years of uproar . . . began working quietly to sort out the merits of all those causes." We have tried to heal divisions, both with insight and with effort, resulting in a qualitative change in our national attitude — our concern for the environment, job security for the work force, dignity for the handicapped, enhanced purpose for the aged, and higher regard for the consumer. These causes are no longer considered controversial but “society's unfinished business," he said.
Big business, in its need to understand the potential impact of the new paradigm, is becoming aware of the networks of the Aquarian Conspiracy as resources. This was the subject of a “preliminary document on emerging trends" published under the Diebold Corporate Issues Program in 1978: The Emergence of Personal Communications Networks Among People Sharing the New Values and Their Possible Use in Sensitizing Operating Management . Its authors urged that management try to "plug into" such networks, where new concepts were developed and experimented with before moving into the marketplace.
Such networks are submerged, of low visibility, "yet much of our future originates there." The report compared them to the committees of correspondents that helped design the American Revolution and to the "invisible college," the secret network of scientists in England before scientific research was legally sanctioned by King James II in 1663.
In a section titled "Why We Do Not See Them," the report pointed out that groups emerging from the underground always fear attack; and, being essentially creative, they shun formal organization in favor of flexibility and new forms.
Before we can discuss these networks, we have a cultural problem to overcome Important organizational forms may exist which have none of the characteristics we usually associate with organizations. But their impact in originating the ideas that are shaping our times is undisputed, and increasingly they are so pervasive that we are surrounded by them. It seems to me there is a common thread. ... In one sense, it's a more idealistic, more humane outlook — a feeling that such goals possess, by being so clearly morally right, an unarguable kind of authority.
That's part of it, but in another sense, it's a supremely pragmatic and realistic view they take of such things — recognizing that change of this kind, being irresistibly right, is also therefore inevitable, and that those who try to stand in its way can only dissipate their energies and substance in a futile effort to hold back the tide.
As an example, the report describes one such underground network, whose main orientation is radical science and transpersonal psychology and whose photo-copying is furnished by the vice-chairman of American Telephone and Telegraph.
Changing Image of Man , the now-classic report issued by SRI in 1972, described a new transcendental social and business ethic characterized by self-determination, concern for the quality of life, appropriate technology, entrepreneurship, decentralization, an ecological ethic, and spirituality. The report urged a rapid corporate understanding of this emergent order, "probably the most important observation of our time."
The new order offers as exciting a challenge as the great geographical expeditions and technological breakthroughs of history, the report said.
THE VALUE OF VOCATION
The contemporary individual's struggle to find that higher purpose — to find meaning in work — was discussed at length in The Gamesman, Michael Maccoby's composite portrait of the new corporate rebel. The gamesman is more innovative and playful than his predecessor, the "organization man," but still judges wins and losses by left-brain, manipulative rules. In a section titled "The Head and the Heart," Maccoby explored the uneasiness and frustration felt by many gamesmen, who acknowledged that they found little opportunity in their work to develop compassion, openness, humanness:
People think of the qualities of the heart as opposite to those of the head. They think heart means softness, feeling, and generosity, while head means toughness, realistic thought. But this contrast itself is symptomatic of a schizoid culture in which the heart is detached from the rest of the body. In pre-Cartesian traditional thought, the heart was considered the true seat of intelligence. . . . The head can be smart but not wise.
In the new paradigm, work is a vehicle for transformation. Through work we are fully engaged in life. Work can be what Milton Mayerhoff called "the appropriate other," that which requires us, which makes us care. In responding to vocation — the call, the summons of that which needs doing — we create and discover meaning, unique to each of us and always changing.
That famous transition, the mid-life crisis, may be due in part to the cumulative effect of decades of denial, the sudden thrust into consciousness of pain that can no longer be sedated. One sensitive observer of the phenomenon said that it manifests as "either a cry or a call" — a cry of disappointment or the stirring call to new purpose — to vocation — experienced by one who has been engaged in introspective, transformative processes for some time.
However intently the person with a vocation may pursue his purpose, he should not be confused with a "workaholic." The workaholic, like an alcoholic, is indiscriminate in his compulsion. He attempts to find meaning by working. The individual with a vocation, on the other hand, finds meaningful work. A vocation is not a job. It is an ongoing transformative relationship.
The participants in the Aquarian Conspiracy questionnaire represented nearly every vocational field: education, psychology, medicine, business, publishing, television, research, government, law, dentistry, the clergy, anthropology, sociology, nursing, the arts, theater, music, the military, political science, economics. There were a few whom a census taker might have considered unemployed: retired persons, housewives, independently wealthy persons — all leading busy lives, pursuing vocations that defy easy description.
In many instances, the individuals defined themselves unconventionally, often in terms of how they actually function, rather than the narrow specialty in which they were trained. A physician described herself as a teacher, a teacher as a futurist.
In a gentle prod toward helping others transform work and wealth, some Aquarian Conspirators actively engage in a kind of institutional rehabilitation — counseling corporations, smoothing the way for new experiments, new jobs, new products; making professional assessments of coming change. Others are models of change, having invented or transformed their own livelihoods. For them Right Livelihood is, more than a Buddhist ideal, a component of mental health.
Some of the sharpest internal conflict reported in the survey was in the struggle to reconcile the old work with the new perspective. During what we have termed the entry-point stage of the transformative process, the new ideas do not seem to threaten work and relationships. During the second stage, exploration, there is the uneasy hope that this new interest will be no more than an intensive avocation. By the third stage, integration, it becomes apparent that the transformative process can't be compartmentalized. As one businessman said:
It will impinge on your work, or your priorities change. The new consciousness affects the way you function in your job. It usurps every waking moment. You look at the world through a different grid, with different eyes.
It's easy for the work to become less important. It's hard to keep making widgets after you've seen the sun. If your job can expand with your vision, you're lucky.
At this critical juncture, the discoveries that accompany transformation are like a compass. The sense of vocation, of having discovered a meaningful direction, strengthens the re- solve to bring work in alignment with belief, head with heart. The new respect for intuition, tacit knowing, encourages risk taking. Security, in the conventional sense, is an illusion. Success itself is redefined. A businessman-conspirator said:
I used to define myself in terms of specific accomplishments. Success might be an A in school — later it was business deals. Now success has to do with living my life in harmony with the universe. It's a question of context and content. You can see individual events, "successes" and "failures," as content. But in the context of life there isn't winning or losing — only the process.
When you experience life as broader, richer, more complex, the events manifest differently.
Conventional goals of success are like a blueprint drawn up by an architect who does not yet know the terrain, who has outlined a structure too rigid for nature. Vocation has more the quality of an inner summons to move in a particular direction, feeling one's way, or of a vision, a glimpse of the future that is more preview than plan. A vision can be realized in many ways ... a goal, in only one. The transformative process enables us to be the artists and scientists of our lives, creating and discovering as we go. There is the awe and excitement of cooperating with the life process, of becoming more sensitive to its clues, nuances, promises.
The clearer sense of self transcends job categories and roles. You are not primarily your job — carpenter, computer programmer, nurse, lawyer. When the respondents to the questionnaire were asked whether or not they regularly read literature "outside your field," many replied that they considered everything to be in their field.
The wholeness experienced through the transformative process says that there doesn't have to be a break between work and pleasure, between convictions and career, between personal ethics and “business is business." Fragmentation becomes increasingly intolerable to the person moving toward greater awareness. As the anesthesia wears off, one feels the tearing of flesh and spirit. And it becomes hard to ignore the context of one's work. Products and services don't exist in a vacuum, after all. They reverberate through a whole system.
The experience of greater connectedness, of unity with others, generates new ways of thinking about problems: joblessness, forced retirement, poverty, fixed incomes, makework, welfare cheating, exploitation. A policy analyst said, “If we think we are a large family, rather than a large factory, we will deal with these problems differently."
The growing network of support — the Aquarian Conspiracy itself — encourages the individual in the lonely enterprise of changing jobs, starting a business, changing the practice of a profession, revitalizing institutions. It is a do-it-yourself revolution, but not do-it-by -yourself. For example, friends in Washington, D.C., started a "go-for-it-group" to encourage each other in their vocational goals. They counseled, inspired, and prodded each other, ruthlessly pointing out the rationalizations and delaying tactics each was using to postpone the risk of a new step. Within a year, several had begun to realize their dreams. A librarian had started her own acting company, an attorney had opened a center for the study of psychology in law, another member turned her farm into an artists' colony, and a bureaucrat resigned his job to go into business with friends.
New attitudes change the very experience of daily work. Work becomes a ritual, a game, a discipline, an adventure, learning, even an art, as our perceptions change. The stress of tedium and the stress of the unknown, the two causes of work-related suffering, are transformed. A more fluent quality of attention allows us to move through tasks that once seemed repetitious or distasteful. We make fewer judgments about what we're doing ("I hate this," "I like this"). Boredom diminishes, just as pain abates when we drop our futile resistance to it.
When the ego is no longer running the show, we make fewer value judgments about the status of the job at hand. We see that meaning can be discovered and expressed in any human service: cleaning, teaching, gardening, carpentry, selling, caring for children, driving a taxi.
The stress of the unknown is transformed by an attitude of trust and patience; when we have learned that breaking apart and reordering are the nature of things, we are less unsettled by the need to change our way of working, to develop a new product, to learn a new skill, to reorganize a task or even a company. The need to innovate becomes a challenge, not a threat.
Carla Needleman, writing of her experience as a craftsman, described this paradox, the goal that betrays the process:
The attitude of the achiever is so fixed in us that we can scarcely envision a different way of our lives. . . . The fact of our lives is uncertainty, and we crave certainty. The fact of our lives is change, movement: We long to ''arrive.''
... I had come to realize that the solidly entrenched attitude toward results — "success” — poisoned all my efforts, and that I could not change it. I wanted to make beautiful pottery, and that desire, which is a kind of avarice, prevented me.
The need for success is a constrictive force that bars me from immediate participation in the moment as it appears, that prevents the all-important conversation with the material of the craft, prevents openness of relationship, prevents a kind of quickness of response much swifter than the cautions of the mind. The need for success distorts pleasure.
A new understanding of success and failure shifts the emphasis in work from the product — "getting there" — to the process itself. Focusing on the goal is a kind of artificial certainty that distracts us from the possibilities inherent in our work. To work creatively and meaningfully, we have to be alert to the moment, willing to change our plans as events show us new possibilities. We need to risk, cooperate with new developments, reconcile conflicts.
THE TRANSFORMATION OF WORK
Work also becomes a medium through which the individual can express the vision of the Aquarian Conspiracy. A New England professor said, "One of my joys in life is passing along the word of the coming transformation to students hearing it for the first time." Composer Harry Chapin said, "After a while, you've got to find a way to plug in. Most of us lack perspective on our own lives. I try to write about that in my music — ordinary people going through extraordinary moments in their lives."
Paolo Soleri, who has attempted through his Arcosanti architecture to "build a bridge between matter and spirit," traces his inspiration to Teilhard. "I became very excited about a book of his I found in the late sixties. I realized that in a very clumsy way, I was translating what he was saying into environmental terms. Eventually I developed my model, which is probably parallel to his."
There are lawyers trying to find less adversarial ways to practice their profession, who see a new role for the law as mediator. A 1978 Columbia University seminar on humanistic law for deans of law schools looked at the implications of the new paradigm, especially its emphasis on cooperation and collaboration.
Calvin Swank, an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Alabama, predicted that even police departments will be affected "as more and more people become absorbed in their own growth and potential." "Self-actualized cops" will question the usual conformity to authority. They will trust their own judgment, based on experience and intuition, and police departments will be unable to cling to their antiquated ways in the face of changing social values.
In many ways the military, with its guaranteed financial base, has more opportunity to fund innovation than any other institution. Jim Channon, a lieutenant colonel in the army's public affairs office in Los Angeles, created a hypothetical "First Earth Battalion," a futurist vision of what a transformed military might be like. The soldiers of the First Earth Battalion seek nondestructive methods of conflict resolution. Their first loyalty is to the planet. After Channon introduced the notion at an army think tank in Virginia he was inundated with requests for more information. He created a packet of material and a T-shirt decal to send out in response to calls from army personnel all over the country. The army's Task Force Delta authorized him to prepare a multimedia presentation on the First Earth Battalion, an idea that seems to generate the response William James called "the moral equivalent of war," a sense of purpose as urgent as the confrontation of danger but without violence.
Task Force Delta itself, the army's tool for innovation and transition, includes systems theorists, semanticists, and specialists in personal growth and the psychology of stress; the structure of the organization is circular rather than the conventional pyramid of a hierarchy.
The constellation of transformative values — wholeness, flow, community — can give meaning to many different kinds of work. And transformation also changes work relationships: between worker and manager, worker and product, worker and consumer.
NEW WORKING RELATIONSHIPS
“It would seem," Tocqueville observed in the mid-nineteenth century, “as if rulers of our time sought only to use men in order to make things great; I wish that they would try a little more to make great men; that they would set less value on the work and more upon the workman; that they would never forget that a nation cannot be strong when everyone belonging to it is individually weak."
In the same way that a gifted teacher releases capacities in the learner, a gifted manager helps workers realize potential skills, enterprise, creativity. The transformative manager encourages self- management in others.
We are entering a period of real change in work relation- ships. A growing number of managers prefer to be catalysts rather than just power wielders, and an emergent breed of autonomous employees gives service but not subservience. This shift is causing not a little discomfort to those who are not changing. Some employees would rather be passive than take on new responsibilities or create their own work plans, which can frustrate the manager who is no longer a traditional boss. One executive commented that his own changes caused him to want not only a new set of friends but a new set of co-workers. On the other hand, autonomy in employees has proven stressful to many traditional managers.
A report from the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research warned that traditional management styles will have to give way. Recognizing the growing autonomy of employees, American Telephone and Telegraph arranged weekend retraining sessions for seventeen hundred managers in 1977 and 1978.
The traits of highly successful managers are strikingly similar to the traits of good teachers discussed in Chapter 9. One study of sixteen thousand managers found success associated with a trusting attitude, concern for the personal fulfillment of employees, a lack of ego, willingness to listen to subordinates, risk-taking, innovation, high expectations, collaboration, and the ability to integrate ideas. IBM, hoping to uncover the traits of chief executive officers (CEOs) in order to design a test to screen management talent, found no overall pattern but a constellation of attitudes about change. CEOs saw systems as open rather than closed, change as organic rather than mechanical. They focused on process more than on goals. And they were creative.
A McGill University report described successful managers as unusually open to the complex and mysterious, interested in “soft” and speculative information (facial expression, tone of voice, gestures, hunches, intuitions). Another study portrayed the successful manager as “scanning the environment, perceiving, brainstorming, intuiting, daydreaming." Executives seemed to call more often than most people on right-hemisphere processes, judging from an EEG study, whereas corporate analysts relied on left-brain strategies, such as qualification.
Ron Medved of the Pacific Institute, a Seattle organization that stages personal development seminars for large institutions, envisioned the coming change:
The New American Working Machine is founded on the philosophy of working smarter, not harder — from the bottom up. (The Japanese have taught us that those who do the work seem to know more about how to do it than anyone else.) There will be a fresh emphasis on innovation and streamlining, for there is no security in our current levels of national productivity.
The New American Working Machine will enjoy a different organizational structure. Bureaucratic dinosaurs with level upon level of decision-making won't survive the competition from new-form management styles both here and abroad. . . .
New American Managers will be recognizable not because they have all the right answers but because they know how to ask the right questions. . . .
The New American Worker seems to be in for the biggest change of all ... a new vision of himself or herself.
The New American Working Machine looks different than many of the worlds you and I work in. While it promises a better world, it challenges us to do a whole lot of growing and changing to get there In a very real way, the New American Working Machine is banking on the sleeping genius in every one of us.
"Sleeping genius," human potential — whatever term they use, new management theorists are interested in the latent capacities that can unfold, given motivation. For instance, workers in the Lucas Aerospace plants in England, threatened in 1974 with the consolidation of their seventeen factories, organized to brainstorm ideas for socially useful products their employer could manufacture. They inventoried their skills, everything from engineering to manual labor, and assessed the company's equipment. Then they issued a questionnaire to the entire work force asking, "What do you think you should be making?" One hundred and fifty viable ideas were translated into designs, specifications, and analyses. Although Lucas's management had been slow to take on the new products, by 1979 the company had manufactured some prototypes and was working with the employee group.
The workers were nominated for the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize by international peace groups and by several members of the Swedish parliament in recognition of their grass-roots effort to convert military into nonmilitary production.
C. Jackson Grayson of the American Productivity Center in Houston, whose research is supported by two hundred of the nation's top corporations, blames the bureaucratic structure of business for suppressing the desire and abilities of individuals to feel they contribute. Contrary to what's being said, "People haven't lost the work ethic," he said.
There is a definite trend toward decentralizing power in companies — dismantling the pyramid, as one consultant„.put it. According to Frank Ruck, who became vice-president of Chicago Title and Trust, "Making organizational changes in work can make people happier, as well as enhancing productivity — a double payoff."
Increasingly, professional management theorists are urging the use of flexible structures, work arrangements that shape themselves to human needs, that tap latent potential. The need for drastic action is evident in the slowdown of American productivity. Despite accelerated technology, the output per man-hour of work in the United States increased only 21 percent between 1970 and 1977. That compared to 41 percent in West Germany, 42 percent in France, 41 percent in Japan, 38 percent in Italy.
"Job enrichment" and "humanizing the workplace" were integrated into management philosophy in many companies in recent years. Semi-autonomous work teams were formed. Higher pay was awarded on the basis of proficiency tests, not job description. Signed time sheets replaced time clocks, those infernal symbols of dehumanization and lack of trust. Assembly lines were broken into smaller components. Some companies adapted consensual management ideas from Japan, Norway, and Sweden. By 1976 more than a thousand United States companies and government agencies were experimenting with "flex-time," a procedure that allows employees to choose their work schedule within certain limits, built around a core period: 6:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., for instance, or 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
The American Council of Life Insurance trend-analysis pro- gram reported in 1979 on "The Changing Nature of Work": a new breed of employee seeking work consistent with personal values; greater flexibility of hours and type of work; more cooperation between management and employees; non-hierarchical organizational structures; a work environment increasingly compatible with physical and mental health.
A Labor Day advertisement by the Communications Workers of America emphasized the concern for meaningful work:
This Labor Day finds masses of American workers searching for the self-esteem that comes with an interesting, challenging, and productive job. A national public opinion firm has been polling young people for several years. They find that regardless of sex, race, or type of employment, people under thirty want jobs that are meaningful and offer a chance for personal growth. . . . [They are] seeking improvement in what is broadly called "the quality of life.'"
THE VALUE OF PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT
These external changes have been fruitful, but they are not enough. Now those concerned about productivity and people have taken the inner route, turning to methods designed for self-actualization. Personal development has become the complement to job enrichment and a humane workplace. And, as one management trainer observed, "We turned to these techniques for pragmatic reasons, and a lot of us got hooked."
Werner Erhard once used the term "high intention" to describe an attitude that contributes to the marked superiority of some workers in any organization:
People who have no intention just go through the motions. They make mistakes, they can't handle things, nothing around them works, they don't do things completely, they complain all the time. What gives people superiority at a task is true intention. That makes you attuned to everything. You handle everything, and your mind doesn't give you reasons for not noticing and not handling things. I don't enjoy people who have low intention. I don't enjoy playing for low stakes I want the person with whom I am interacting to have something at stake.
High intention cannot coexist with a low self-image. Only those who are awake, connected, and motivated can add to the synergy of an organization. Everyone else adds to entropy, randomness. To achieve major changes in worker attitudes, management is turning increasingly to training techniques drawn from consciousness research.
Trainers are now talking about cultural trance, the fear of transformation, alternative realities, paradigm shifts, insights, the importance of individuals learning to "see through new eyes." A two-part article in Training, a professional journal, said, "As trainers we cannot afford to ignore what is happening in the human-potential movement." It quoted a bank executive on the awakening of his staff through personal-growth seminars: "For my money, these soul-searchers are our future."
Personal-growth training doesn't and shouldn't promise more widgets per hour, fewer grievances, less overtime, or more sales — "but then neither does your liability insurance." Mostly people will begin to feel better about who they are and what they're doing about their lives. "There is no accounting entry headed 'number of people who feel good about themselves.' But perhaps, just perhaps, that's an outcome much too big and important for inclusion on a mere profit and loss statement."
Many companies have undertaken stress-reduction training programs for their employees, biofeedback training, programs to enhance creativity. Some have set aside quiet sites for rest and meditation. Indeed, the health aspects of the transformative technologies are a major rationale for corporate support. A fully functioning employee with a healthy self-image is money in the bank — at any rate, that was the original rationale, but now many companies seem to consider the development of employee potential as part of their social responsibility.
General Electric has sponsored conferences on right- and left-brain research relevant to creativity. Menninger Foundation seminars on "The Other Self" have been staged for many corporate groups. "Companies are caught in a 'revolution of rising expectations' of what it takes to be fully human," said Layne Longfellow of Menninger. "Somebody raised the ante. We face an aspiration gap between what we are and what we're beginning to consider normal."
Intuition need not be the exclusive province of executives. Jay Mendell, a business futurist, said in Planning Review. Millions of workers, having discovered new capacities through the psychotechnologies, are eager to develop their intuition and creativity on the job.
Much as the new paradigm of education sees in all of us the creative potential we once attributed only to geniuses, management trainers are beginning to look at all employees as potential self-managers who can begin to think like entrepreneurs.
THE NEW ENTREPRENEUR
In the communication to members of the Linkage network in the summer of 1979, Robert Theobald cited the many letters from those longing to move more strongly toward a new society. He asked:
What is holding us back in Linkage and throughout the society? I believe we are afraid of recognizing how fundamentally our lives would have to be changed if we should choose to work out of this vision. We are caught in old models, and most of us owe our survival to the fact that we straddle the "functioning" present world and the new universe which we should like to bring into existence.
The paradox is that the new world promises to be both personally and professionally more rewarding if we would take the leap of faith to embrace it.
For many, entrepreneurship — being in business for oneself — is a natural sequel to the transformative process. Armed with a greater sense of self and vocation, a new willingness to risk (and be poor for a time), emotional support from the network, a sturdier trust in their own creativity and will, they make their own work. These new enterprises are characterized by the Buddhist ideal of Right Livelihood: work that serves society and does not harm the environment.
Briarpatch, a Bay Area network of three hundred or so businesses, artists, and nonprofit organizations, is a mutual-help medium for entrepreneurs "trying to reveal and uncover principles that can help us reconnect with our community and society rather than exploit them." Dick Raymond, Briarpatch founder, described the stress of translating one's new philosophy into practice:
Crossing this river is difficult: it means leaving behind some of your old ideas about work and jobs Most of us (including myself) try to tiptoe around the pain, but it's important to talk about some of the agonies one is apt to confront. We're not talking about simply trading one job for another, or getting from one company into a more suitable one. When you start abandoning your old beliefs or values, some very primal circuits get ignited. . . . You may be stuck on the threshold for two or three years. Before moving on, you have to clear away all your cherished beliefs.
The people I know who have successfully made this transition are the most joyful, the most outgoing, the most well-rewarded people I know. As I meet more every day, their existence sustains my sanity.
Entrepreneurship fills many of the needs of transformation. Richard Gunther, a successful real-estate developer, described to a group of would-be entrepreneurs the confluence of work and enjoyment, socially constructive aims pursued in fellowship with congenial people, a sense of "conscious" and creative enterprise.
Training programs have been developed to prepare those setting out on their own. Based in part on his growing interest in the phenomenon and his weekend School for Entrepreneurs, Bob Schwartz, founder of Tarrytown (New York) Executive House, has characterized the new breed as catalysts who may transform the marketplace:
The emerging entrepreneur is a more truly thoughtful person who is changing products and services to fill the needs of a more thoughtful and caring audience than the world has previously known. . . . This is what the young are saying: Don't make me an adjunct to the process; make me inherent in it.
The new reality is that products are not going to be a major part of the American scene. Production is rapidly moving downhill as a factor in the American economy, and services are moving in.
Entrepreneurs, Schwartz said, are "the poets and packagers of new ideas, both visualizers and actualizes." Historically, in a time of cultural change, a new type of entrepreneur emerges to embody the vision with services and products.
He pointed to the burgeoning demand for human- development courses as an example of service needs little known a decade ago. The new entrepreneurs have moved from a manipulative I-it to an I-Thou philosophy, relating to both consumer and product in immediate, personal ways. They and their customers "are the most potent revolutionary force that America furnishes to the world. The entrepreneur is the new non-violent Change Agent."
The Renascence Project in Kansas City, a network of entrepreneurs, demonstrated that alternatives can be both cost effective and profitable. Among its activities: renovation of properties at a key Kansas City location into an eight-million dollar business complex, the establishment of learning networks, an educational program for the "whole person," a self-supporting alternative high school, restoration of a historic dance hall, restoration of a large house by a partnership of residents, and development of a master plan for Kansas City calling for block-by-block renovation of neighborhoods along an eleven-mile pedestrian mall.
In an article titled "The Coming Entrepreneurial Revolution," Norman McRae, the editor of the British publication The Economist, suggested that the creeping giantism in American industry has opened the door for the emergence of entrepreneurship patterns even within large industry. Small enclaves in big companies may be run by these "intrapreneurs." The article also predicted that big-business corporations, in their present form, may disappear by the year 2010.
The new entrepreneurs refuse to separate good-for-business from good-for-people. Mo Siegel, co-founder of the Celestial Tea Company in Boulder, Colorado, has articulated this view for his two hundred and thirty employees: "All department leaders will be held accountable for their people development as well as business results." Achievement, Siegel said, is just a by-product of living an ideal. "In this age of transition, we're learning to retain the good aspects of the culture while discarding negative ones."
THE RE-EVALUATION OF TECHNOLOGY
The problem with technology, Robert Pirsig observed in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, is its noncoalescence between reason and feeling. Technology has not been connected with matters of the spirit and of the heart, "and so it does blind, ugly things quite by accident and gets hated for that."
In the emergent paradigm technology is not seen as negative, just abused and in need of rehumanization. Our technology promised us power but it became our master in too many areas of our lives. Little wonder many of the "new" political and economic perspectives look to the past in their preference for decentralization, their sensitivity to natural harmonies and concern for stewardship of the land, their desire for "creative simplicity," spiritual and cultural enrichment, the celebration of nonmaterial values.
A society's consciousness should be the context for its work and consumption; its technology, only the content: tools that create products and services the people value. E. F. Schumacher's original title for the book that became famous as Small Is Beautiful was Economics As If People Mattered. He particularly deplored the effects of big, unconscious applications of technology: centralization, urbanization, the depletion of resources, [6] the dehumanization of workers. Particularly in developing countries, turbines, dams, and earth-moving machines can disrupt social patterns to the detriment of both environment and people. Schumacher's Radical-Center response to applied science gone berserk was what he called "appropriate technology."
"Intermediate" or appropriate technology offers a third way: tools more advanced than a primitive shovel but more practical and human-scaled than a bulldozer. With superior but manageable tools people can improve their lot without going to urban factories.
"Before we choose our tools and techniques," said an editorial in Rain: The Journal of Appropriate Technology, "we must choose our dreams and values, for some technologies serve them, while others make them unobtainable."
Schumacher's ideas have had a worldwide influence. An article on appropriate technology in Foreign Affairs in late 1977 resulted in the biggest reprint request in that publication's history.
Many countries and some states have set up offices of appropriate technology. The United Nations is establishing a global network of institutions to further the idea. Appropriate technology has been endorsed by the International Labor Organization, the World Bank, the president of the Philippines, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. In the two years preceding his death Schumacher was the guest and advisor of presidents, prime ministers, and kings.
Schumacher's economic philosophy reflected intense spiritual values he discussed more fully in the posthumously published Guide for the Perplexed. Spiritual values, indeed, are at the base of much of the ecological concern in our time, a quickening sense of the whole earth, respect for the matrix of our evolution, the nature in which we are embedded. Fittingly, Lao-tse is quoted in the brochure of California's Office of Appropriate Technology: "These are my treasures. Guard them well."
THE VALUE OF CONSERVATION
Environmental concerns have a growing impact on lifestyle and consumption. A study conducted in the state of Washington in 1976, published in 1978, polled householders drawn randomly from the telephone directories of every community. The researchers found evidence of surprising adherence to "a new environmental paradigm."
A majority of those polled expressed concern about the abuse of the environment and uncontrolled population growth. They saw earth as a spaceship with limited room and resources. They favored a steady-state economy with control of industrial growth. They opposed the idea of human dominance over nature. In every particular, the general public supported the views of environmentalists in their state.
Behavior is not necessarily consistent with beliefs, the researchers noted, and conceded that many of the respondents might resist personal sacrifice.
. . . We nonetheless must stress what we believe to be the rather remarkable nature of our results. When we consider that just a few short years ago, concepts such as "limits to growth" and "spaceship earth" were virtually unheard of, the degree to which they have gained acceptance among the public is extremely surprising. This acceptance is all the more surprising when one realizes how dramatically the new environmental paradigm departs from our society's traditional worldview. . . . Indeed, in a society which has always taken abundance, growth, progress, etc., for granted, the rise of the new paradigm represents a revolutionary occurrence . . . we cannot help but be impressed by its rapid ascendance.
The shift to an environmental view involves vastly more than a concern for redwoods. Nowhere is the connectedness of all life more evident than in our awakened ecological conscience. Care of the planet joins economic, legal, political, spiritual, aesthetic, and medical issues. It extends to our purchases, choice of family size, recreation. The youngest school child is aware of the controversies — military defoliation, nuclear power, carcinogens, supersonic transports, dams flooding Indian burial grounds, population growth, propellant gases that may destroy the ozone layer. The young fear the slow death of Earth as a previous generation feared the atomic bomb.
Ecotopia, a novel by Ernest Callenbach, launched something of a cult, especially in the western United States. Originally issued by a small press, the book became an underground best-seller and was republished as a mass-market paperback in 1978. Ecotopia is a fictional new country created by the secession of Washington, western Oregon, and Northern California. Ecotopians employ alternative technology and are hyperconscious of environmental issues.
Ecotopia enthusiasts have designed a flag, created a magazine, named schools and streets after the book, and even celebrated Ecotopia Day in Eugene, Oregon. Callenbach was invited to Sacramento to confer with the California governor and his advisers. However far-fetched the premise of a new country — a new beginning — the book's mass appeal tells us something.
Sim Van der Ryn, first director of California's Office of Appropriate Technology and former state architect, insists that Ecotopian communities are possible right now, at least "the construction of some modest first examples." He urged enlightened entrepreneurs and politicians to commit themselves to an idea that could bring credit to business and government alike. "The seeds of ecological design are beginning to sprout, and many of the hardware components to create an ecologically stable urban community have already been developed and are working. What we have yet to do is bring together all the threads and weave them into a single coherent design for a new community."
A sound environmental approach will revitalize urban design, retaining the best of the high-technology culture "while renewing people's sense of place." It will translate the old linear understanding into systems thinking, an awareness of the complex interactions of people and environmental elements.
Another urbanologist called this "the age of recovery" for many American cities; a time of new understanding of urban amenities, a sense of historic continuity, the need for energy efficiency, and new insights on how people want to live, including more humanly scaled architecture. "We have begun to settle down, finally, to seek a sense of place."
Well-known architects surveyed in 1979 described a new paradigm of urban design: more human, with a richer mix of housing and community facilities, places to walk, heightened concern about public transportation, the creation of festive malls and squares, the planting of more trees, a sense of "the commons." An emergent technology will draw increasingly on wind, sun, tidal forces, natural lighting, and natural ventilation.
We may be on our way to regaining the intimate connection and awareness of our place in nature. This neo-medieval trend is evident in another phenomenon: environments of celebration — fairs, expositions, and festivals. In medieval Europe fairs were set up at crossroads, in neutral territory, so that warring people could drop their hostilities long enough to barter, juggle, mime, eat, drink, make music. They were one in celebration — playful, curious, unselfconscious. We are recreating spontaneous community in our tens of thousands of art and craft exhibits, music festivals, environmental and new-age "expos," and period celebrations like Renaissance fairs, medieval games, Dickensian bazaars.
People are improvising new ways to observe old holidays, like a July Fourth "Interdependence Day" celebrated by the Friends Meeting of Palo Alto, California. After sharing food, music, crafts, and games, they concluded by lighting candles and singing "Let There Be Peace on Earth." One participant said, "Celebrations like this come from ourselves. They need not be confined to traditional holidays. They can acknowledge other meaningful events in our lives .... What if we really gave ourselves the opportunity to explore our imaginations — if we let go of prefabricated forms of creativity?"
IMAGINATION AS A SOURCE OF WEALTH
Here and there are cheerful insurrections by citizens of the new commonwealth, early drafts of its constitutions, its declaration of interdependence. If you know what to look for, you can detect the architecture of invisible cathedrals and theaters and lending libraries, universities without walls, the society whose individuals are its institutions and whose awakening sense of fraternity is its highest law.
The true source of wealth, Eugen Loebl concluded while brooding about economics during his fifteen years as a political prisoner in Czechoslovakia, is not its productivity, its Gross National Product, its tangible assets. Creative intelligence is the wealth of a modern society. "If we see gain as a function of man's ability to think, and if we recognize the importance of the intellectual level on which the economy is based, then our prime interest will be oriented toward the development of this level. . . . We can change our reality toward the goals we desire."
On his historic visit to the United States, Tocqueville sailed down the Ohio River. On one hand was Ohio, a free state; on the other Kentucky, a slave state. On the Ohio side of the river he observed industrious activity, rich harvests, handsome homes. The Ohioan could enter any path fortune might open to him. He might become a sailor, a pioneer, an artisan, a laborer. On the Kentucky side Tocqueville saw only indolence. Not only were the slaves half-hearted in their labors, but the masters themselves were enslaved. They could not work their own land because that would demean their status. A few crossed over to Ohio to work, but most turned for excitement to "the passionate love of field sports and military exercises . . . violent bodily exertion, the use of arms "
We have passed into other cultural ages, each with its own forms of economic and psychological enslavement. For too long, like the Kentucky slaveholders, we have turned our best energies toward the pursuit of secondary excitement, hoping to find in such distractions the reward that comes only from vocation. But we have a choice; now we can emigrate to a freer state, finding there new heart, new enterprise, and values that match our deepest needs.
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Notes:
1 Max Planck once said that he had started out as a student of economics: finding it too difficult, he took up physics.
2 Immigrants to California established similar networks, according to sociologists. James Q. Wilson described a version of urban labor-swapping in California in the 1950s that foreshadowed today's extensive bartering: “The Southern California equivalent of the eastern uncle who could get it for you wholesale was the Los Angeles brother-in-law who would help you put on a new roof or paint the garage, or lend you (and show you how to use) his power saw. A vast, informally organized labor exchange permeated the region, with occasional trades of great complexity running through several intermediaries — the friend who would ask his brother, the plumber, to help you, if you would ask your uncle with the mixer to lay concrete in front of somebody's sister's home. Saturday saw people driving all over the county, carrying out these assignments."
3 Barter is also big business these days among trading corporations within the Soviet Union and among multi-national companies that trade raw materials for finished products.
4 A three-year, one-million-dollar study of changing consumer values, released by SRI in 1979, predicted a continuing shift away from conventional materialistic values by individuals across the economic spectrum.
5 One example of big business cooperating with social trends: Hofmann-LaRoche, the pharmaceutical company, began furnishing complimentary tapes on holistic medicine to physicians in the early 1970s and more recently sponsored symposia on such topics as alternatives to drug therapy. In 1979, with increasing numbers of people turning to vitamins and nutrition rather than drugs, Hofmann-LaRoche announced its plans to build an immense Vitamin C plant.
6 The United States, with 6 percent of the world's population, consumes more than 30 percent of its energy resources.